Reviews – Books/Music/Etc.

The book I just finished reading only moments ago, Disconnect, by Devra Davis Ph.D., M.P.H., Co-laureat Nobel Peace Prize 2007, is perhaps one of the most startlingly real books I have read in some time as it deals with the glue that holds our society and one may go as far as saying our civilization together.

I’m speaking of the cell phone.

I cant delve too much into the book without sounding foolish and making numerous misquotes, after all, who am I, surely not a scientist and barely a person worth listening to except for the fact that I read this book and am fairly able to write with some proficiency.

In essence, the cell phone comes from the same basic principle as the early aircraft radar systems which gave way to microwave ovens, officers would cook hot dogs on the tips of their swords in front of the radar, whilst sailors on watch would warm themselves in front of the radar on cold nights, others still would stand in front of the radar to reduce sperm counts before hitting ports of call as i was rumored to drop your sperm counts thereby being a form of birth control.

Not much has changed except for the fact that the power of these devices has increased while the size has decreased, which has in turn allowed cell phones to be increasingly powerful (analog, 2G, 3G, now 4G) and instance of brain tumors and tumors in the gland behind the jaw bone among other instances of dis-ease including a burgeoning instance of breast cancer (phones help for safe keeping in the bra???) are reaching unprecedented numbers.

If you do you best to live a healthy life, if you care about your children, please take some time to at least take a look at this book, after all, Steve Jobs (founder – Apple), would not let his children use computers or cell phones.

What you know is usually what you are told and what you are told, as we now know when it comes to most things, for example, asbestos, or weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, or GMO’s to save the world from starvation, may have the best intentions at heart or may be complete lies, either way, it takes a long time for the truth to surface and when it finally does, then the cover ups are found and already a swath of destruction has been visited upon many lives.

The truth will always come out, but how about the carnage before the truth comes out when the industry sows lies to reap profit? Could cell phones be the next Tobacco… Or worse….

go to ehtrust.org, this is Dr. Davis’ site for more info and please do read the book. It is a rare thing to find so much information so very compelling and palatable!

I’ve decided to write this review by using excerpts from the book itself rather than the usual drivel that comes from my pen, or keystrokes, or what you would usually find dripping from the quill of most reviewers, I digress, many reviewers are such as they do not partake in the rampant smattering of adjectives and instead do an actual good work of a review, I am not one of those enlightened souls and will instead leave you with wisdom I found myself copying from the book and you can make your own decisions about the genius or lack thereof contained ‘neath that cover=].

Enjoy with Aloha.

– Vidot did not judge too the man too harshly for having a mistress. It occured all to frequently in French society, it was as ordinary as the sliver of lemon rind that came with the morning espresso. But, in his opinion, it did suggest a weak man and a dull mind. Any fool could seduce, but it took a true intellect to know and love his partner. Women, to Charles Vidot, were absolute and thrilling mysteries. They moved though the world as if a different gravity applied to them and answered to untranslatable calls of the body and soul.

– We assume so much and forget how little we are promised.

– Knowing winter is returning only makes the spring that much more wonderful.

– He understood that some other souls might be panicked or even overwhelmed with grief at the thought of being trapped in a small insect’s body, but, he thought, these were generally the same people who felt cursed when there were only plain croissants at the market, or complained when the lunch waiter was slow. Whereas he believed life, any life, was a curious adventure, and if you merely kept your wits about you and stayed alert and in motion, you could find your way to a satisfactory conclusion.

– “Men have dragged us by the hair through the ages, and whether they give us crumbs or bright, shiny rocks, they truly give us nothing at all. If you have not opened your legs for them so that they could crawl out as babies or crawl in as men, then they will leave you to starve like a dog on the street. So now we are done playing the way they want us to play. Now we are moving to music they cannot hear, to a rhythm they cannot understand. They call it madness and we call it truth and find me a magistrate you can trust to judge between the two? Bah. So we dance on, we dance on.”

– Nothing is as good as the smell of horseshit. You know, the streets are swept clean now, and all the horses are gone, so there is nothing in the air but the soot of your burning engines. Thats why I sleep in the barn, to be close to the real smells. Horseshit and horse farts. Those are the smells of life.

– “Gambling is funny, isn’t it? I’ve never heard any persuasive theories on it’s roots, I suspect its some primordial residue from our early days, similar to how we still wear the belts that once held our hunting knives, while our women carry designer purses to store all those harvested berries. We think we’re modern and civilized, but Lord knows we’re not.”

– These were the things that defined your character and, as his grandfather had often told him, your character was the only thing you ever wholly and truly posessed.

– Zoya looked into her glass of wine. “But it’s funny, don’t you think? The way you Americans killed them. I read about it in a book once. How you would make treaties, yes? And then you would break the treaties so they would get upset and make war and so you would kill them and then there were new treaties? And you kept going and going, the same trick, over and again, until there weren’t any more Indians.”

– Ghosts, they say, stay for three simple reasons:
They love life to wholly to leave,
They love someone too deeply to part,
Or they need to linger on a bit,
To coax a distant knife
Toward its fated throat.

– There are rarely any big problems, only little problems that pile up

– Where would the world be, she wondered, without all these blind and greedy men.

– The whole fight is for the conservation of the individual soul. The enemy is the suppression of history; against us is the bewildering propaganda and brainwash, luxury and violence. – Ezra Pound, The Paris Review

This is most likely one of those very few films that actually does not only a profound job of inspiring those who watch it, but further goes on to do so using reality, and delving deeper, it uses a reality that is so far fetched it seems like fiction.
This may be only the 3rd such film/story I have been exposed to in my life, 38 years, to have such a profound impact on me and my life and how I view the world and my place in it.
I am purposely not saying much as, A. Historically when typing reviews on my blog in the early a.m. I am often quite reticent to actually write anything, and B. The story is crafted in such a way that I deign to spill any of its secrets here as I am not the master weaver of the narrative and to try and describe any part of any one thread seems to me a fools errand and should you actually see this movie, you’ll simply be upset at me.
So we keep this easy peasy… I guarantee that if you watch this you will be inspired, amazed, likely moved to tears and after all, this man is considered to be one of the principal elements in really kicking off freedom in South Africa, now, thats big… Real big.

Like this:

This book, nay, this tome of delight is the second by Frank Schatzing and it represents not only a stylistic hot bed of the most up to date cutting edge thoughts and current theory in science as it pertains to space exploration, mining, the space race, socio economics on a global scale, the Chinese government and its nefarious side and even the tricky shadow side to politics with an action story that builds, crests and keeps coming after 1300 pages!

Lastly, taken from the book itself to give you the true depth of this genius:

[LIMIT] Frank Schätzing

But transition had never gone smoothly, never in history. Not in the Cambrian epoch, not in the Ordovincian, the Denovian, not at the end of the Permian, Triassic, or Cretaceous, and not in the upper Pleistocene either. That was when a new species called mankind appeared, a self-aware creature who added war and economic crisis to the catalogue of boundary events that already included volcanic eruption, meteorites, ice ages, and epidemics. So the brave new world of clean fusion came hand in hand with a full blown global economic crisis, wether the heralds of a new dawn liked it or not.

“Do you realize the term zi you was only exported to China in the middle of the nineteenth century.” Tu continued obstinately, “Five thousand years of Chinese history weren’t enough to create it, nor were they enough for min zhu, democracy, or ren quan, human rights. But what does zi you mean? To stay true to yourself. To make you and your point of view the starting point for everything you do, not the dogma of how the masses think and feel….”.

“There are things you can do about everything these days.” – Surgeon, Frank Schatzener LIMIT

Enough talk, go read.

Share this:

Like this:

…All they did was eat, sleep, s#%t, f*!k and consume. What was their true contribution to society? Did they do anything but breed more of themselves to buy more of the crap that made other people rich? …

Like this:

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

This is a book I just finished, as this spans a couple of days, I finished it a few days ago. Below are quotes from the book that hit me like a bucket of cold water to the face while in a deep sleep….

“THEY REMAIN SLAVES BECAUSE THEY CANT SEE WHAT IS BEAUTIFUL IN THE WORLD.”

This wasn’t capitalized in the book….. but I felt it needs to be blasted out.

“Free people don’t know the value of freedom, that’s the problem.”

Now as for what the book is actually about, I have no recollection at all, not in the slightest. I only know that it was one of those books, that for me, would be considered profound.

O.K., I admit, I read another review to help, ah, jog my memory. This book was ninja to be sure, of course dont take my word for it, It won the 40th ever Manbooker award and it was Mr. Adiga’s debut novel!

Siddhartha by Herman Hesse

“I was looking for the key for years, but the door was always open”

This is another RAD, super rad book which, thanks be, was gifted to me by a wonderful man from Germany, Lorenz W. Thanks Lorenz! It is about a boy who journeys to become a sage, that isn’t even right, he journeys far beyond what we understand, he journeys to the sublime and it is written in such a way that no matter where your reading skill level or level of spirituality, you will notice immediately 2 things. The book is finished almost as soon as you began, and upon realizing it’s done, you understand so much of what you never even thought before.

I Am by Howard Falco

I had the distinct pleasure of speaking with this gentleman on the phone and to this day I am unsure how we came into each others orbit, and yet, I guess I do know. This book is fantastically written especially for those of us who view things as a logic journey vice the more guttural, at least this is my view. he, Mr. Falco, somehow managed to write down the processes that most if not all of us go through to figure things out, the pitfalls, ego traps, the signs of coming out into better understanding, he’s got it all!

The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz

This is o e of the first books that I found myself listening to again and again and again. So, at least you now know I am speaking of an audiobook. The book is read by a member of the Toltec community, or at least that’s what the download I got said, and I would believe it as the voice had such a wonderful effect on me.

The book is fairly simple in that it takes what you already know and then puts it back together in a way that you would most likely have trouble doing on your own. The finished result is magic pure and simple.

The essence of said magic can be summed up in the following from the book:

A Still Forest Pool by Ajahn Chah

Ajahn Cha is one of the members of a discipline of Buddhism which seems to be thought of as Forest Monks, and I am a bit out of my league here, so if you have definitive knowledge about this, please enlighten me as well. I do not know of discipline is actually the correct term, but, it is as it is, monks who live in the forest. Conversely, you can also click on the above link and be taken to a website devoted totally to him and learn, which I guess I could have done as well, but, I’ve wasted enough of your time with my confusion, so perhaps you can save yourself…=]

I have read many books by Buddhist monks and thoroughly enjoy them all, this was in a period of time in Hawaii where the only things I would read were Ian Flemming James Bond novels and books by Monks on how to be at peace with yourself and the world.

I guess I was subconsciously seeking balance….

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

Many of you by now have more than likely at least heard of this book and the author, who was taken hostage and tortured at one point, which is always a very heavy thing to have happen to oneself.

The story is of a young man who goes in search of that something, and at the risk of ruining one of the most masterfully crafted books I have read in my life, I will say no more. Simply know this is an easy book to read, is thoroughly engrossing and is one of the very few page turners I have found in my life.